Ask HN: A social media company is hostile to my side project. Do I fight or not?
I run an app that crowd sources the collection of comments so you can see what gets censored, changed or deleted. It gained a good amount of popularity (about 40k users) and I even started charging for it.
I've managed to break out of api jail, but my app has been taken out of the chrome marketplace at this companies request. I have options, but I'm sure the conflict will continue.
Does HN have experience dealing with larger hostile entities? Am I destined to get beat down by overwhelming force? I'd love to hear about how similar situations played out.
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Looking at the discussion you started 2 years ago on the social media company's website [1], there were two objections raised:
1. users who think that deleting their comment will remove it are ill-served by your extension
2. your extension increases load on their servers
Besides the obvious trademark violation of the domain you are using [2] (which might be why your extension was removed from the Chrome marketplace), you should be able to avoid objection #2 by refactoring your extension (you may have already done so, I did not spend time looking around in the Firefox extension source to find out).
#1 is probably more insurmountable. It seems likely that if your side project becomes more popular, the way that deleted comments are implemented will change on the site for the worse, and functionality for all users would decrease. From a moral standpoint, you might want to stop working on this for that reason.
[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/etd52/lets_have_a_discussion_about_deleted_comments/
[2]: http://www.unedditreddit.com/
This is what's known as a sucker's game: At the end of the day you're playing on someone else's playground and they set the rules. In an ideal world you own your own playground, but if you can't afford one find one with more open policies.
If you want an example from the big boys take a look at Facebook: They couldn't offer a custom experience on iOS so they forked Android (Amazon did the same thing too, and so will Samsung before long).
You should make your OWN social network... with blackjack... and hookers...